Do stuff. Make it timely. Tell people about it. — My fellow Americans…if I may call you that? I’ve only been a US citizen for five weeks, but I think I may have identified a key weakness in the Democrats’ electioneering strategy, and I wanted to bring it to your attention because it would be great if the forced birth/martial…

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #20yrsago Carnegie-Mellon offers course on DRM https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2002/Aug/65 #15yrsago AllOfMP3 founder not guilty of copyright infringement https://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/biztech/08/15/russia.site.reut/index.html #15yrsago US schools ask 14-year-olds to declare a major https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/education/16major.html #10yrsago The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computers https://web.archive.org/web/20120820010532/http://fora.tv/2012/07/31/Cory_Doctorow_Coming_War_Against_Your_Computer_Freedom…

Total pwnage, with a a side of copyfraud. — Last Saturday, I sat in a crowded ballroom at Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas and watched Sickcodes jailbreak a John Deere tractor’s control unit live, before an audience of cheering Defcon 30 attendees (and, possibly, a few undercover Deere execs, who often attend Sickcodes’s talks). The presentation was significant because…

2012, 2017. — #10yrsago RIP, Harry Harrison https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/08/15/rip-harry-harrison/ #10yrsago A Mary Blair Treasury of Golden Books https://memex.craphound.com/2012/08/15/a-mary-blair-treasury-of-golden-books/ #10yrsago Neo-Nazi MEP from Hungary discovers he is Jewish https://web.archive.org/web/20120815003037/https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/08/14/world/europe/ap-eu-hungary-rightists-roots.html

Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense — I first learned about Dr. Thomas Radecki in the mid-1980s, when my grandmother became concerned that my Dungeons and Dragons hobby was going to unmoor me from reality and send me spiraling into delusion and misery, ending in murder. Radecki was the psychiatrist who testified that the teenager Darren Molitor…

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. #20yrsago Hypercard is back, baby https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-gone-2/ #15yrsago An anonymous Disney employee vandalized the Wikipedia entry on DRM by removing all mentions of me https://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-openness-matters-doubly.html #15yrsago Catalog of Fox News Wikipedia whitewashes https://web.archive.org/web/20071013134521/https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2007/08/14/fox-news-changes-wikipedia-to-smear-rivals-olbermann-and-franken-comprehensive-list-of-changes…

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. #20yrsago FBI on warchalking: the sky is falling, halp! https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2002/Aug/63 #15yrsago Karl Schroeder: Colonize the Earth https://web.archive.org/web/20071108231653/https://worldchanging.com/archives/007092.html #10yrsago Bain Capital buys profitable American plant, ships it to China; soon-to-be-jobless workers train their overseas replacements https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/aug/10/illinois-workers-bain-outsourcing

Oh, the sheer poetry of “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security Rulemaking.” — The biggest fallacy in the online privacy is that there is a difference between “state surveillance” and “commercial surveillance.” Bizarrely, it’s a fallacy that is widely held by both government snoops and Big Tech snoops. Many’s the time I’ve spoken to a DC audience about privacy, only to have an…

2007, 2012, 2017. — #15yrsago Epcot’s secret meeting rooms https://web.archive.org/web/20071025054350/https://thedisneyblog.com/tdb/2007/08/the-secret-room.html #10yrsago Time wars: our finite lives frittered away in the precarious world of automation https://web.archive.org/web/20120813051220/https://www.gonzocircus.com/xtrpgs/incubate-special-exclusive-essay-time-wars-by-mark-fisher/ #10yrsago Mitt Romney’s tax bill under Paul Ryan’s budget? 0.82% (Your taxes will probably go up, though) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/mitt-romney-would-pay-082-percent-in-taxes-under-paul-ryans-plan/261027/…